Though Marianne seemed to remember a place where things had stayed the same. Oh, the joyous recognition of a place like that. To see the same faces, the same places. To know them! Not always to be among strange places and people.
It was an aberrant thought. One she might be punished for, if anyone found out.
‘The Map Police could find out,’ she told the puppies. ‘They really could. They know things about people. Sometimes they come into the laundry and arrest people. For the things they’re trying to clean, you know?’
Silver looked at her with complete understanding, as though she knew all too well.
Usually in the evening, Marianne watched the television. There were always three music programs, two drama programs, and the obligatory palace broadcast, in no consistent order. There was also the half-hour lost-and-found program, which she always watched with complete attention. It wasn’t the mappers’ fault: every program started with a disclaimer by the map commission, but sometimes things got disconnected. Children from their parents. Husbands and wives. Parts of houses. Belongings.
First there was a fanfare. Then the disclaimer, read by the High Commissioner. Then the brief announcements, sometimes with pictures. ‘Reward offered for the return of our beloved son, Roger Erickson, age three, lost during the last changeover.’ Name of family, name of house. Marianne wrote it down. She always wrote the locations down. Who knew? She might find one of them. Picture of Roger. Fat. Dimpled. Not very bright looking.
‘Not very bright looking,’ said Marianne.
‘Woof,’ agreed Rouge.
‘Reward offered for the location of our kitchen and servants’ quarters, inadvertently misplaced during the last changeover.’ Name of house. Floor plan of kitchen, as though that made any difference. ‘If you found a kitchen attached to your house and it didn’t belong there,’ Marianne remarked, ‘you’d call them, wouldn’t you? Why show us the floor plan?’
Gold panted briefly, licked a paw, then returned her liquid brown gaze to Marianne’s face.
‘Reward offered for a set of five things taken from the palace,’ the announcer intoned. ‘Purposefully detached, not lost during changeover. All citizens are encouraged to keep their eyes open for five things that may have been stolen from the palace. Five similar things.’
Silver growled deep in her throat. Rouge laughed. Delphy tried to catch his tail. Gold and Liquorice were playing tag around the legs of a chair.
‘No,’ Marianne said, looking at them. ‘Puppies aren’t things. The announcement said five things.’
‘Not many things come in fives,’ her mind said.
‘No,’ she said again. ‘Puppies aren’t things. It couldn’t be.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Today’s city was Brandton-Minor. Marianne checked the map over her morning coffee. The palace was at the center of the map, as it always was. Other things moved; the palace did not. Not the palace and not the Bureau of Maps. The Clean Machine had continued its slow approach and was now within six blocks of it. ‘We’ll probably never be this close again,’ she told the pups. ‘We can go see the palace this evening. After work. I’ll get tomorrow’s map at noon, and that’ll leave plenty of time.’ It seemed likely that palace viewing would need an hour or more. The television often showed endless streams of pedestrians and bus passengers on their way to or from the palace.
When she set out, the puppies in a straggling tail at her heels, the streets were full of people headed in the same direction. Marianne followed along, part of the human procession, smiling, nodding, exchanging a few words. Today she was tempted to look for someone recognizable. Someone she might have seen before. Marianne played this game seldom and saw anyone she recognized less often yet, but she frequently met the same half-curious, half-searching glances she knew was on her own face.
The block nearest the palace fence was very crowded. The puppies whined. Marianne picked them up and put them in the large canvas bag she was carrying. Their heads poked above the top, peering curiously at the crowd.
People worked their way to the fence, stood there staring for a time, then departed. Those at the back of the crowd were gradually shifted forward. When Marianne’s time at the fence came, she stared no less curiously than the rest. There was the sloping lawn, the two vast fountain basins to left and right, the slender pillars supporting the roof of the portico, the rows of flimsy trees. A line of black-clad guardsmen stood motionlessly upon the stairs. A gardener worked on his knees beside one of the fountains.
One of the puppies whined, briefly, and there was a small convulsion in the canvas bag. Marianne looked down to see the bag almost empty. Only Rouge and Liquorice stared up at her, their tongues out. The others had jumped out and run off. Somewhere.
‘Cute pups,’ someone said.
She looked through the fence into the eyes of a guardsman, his face immobile, as though carved from some dark stone. One hand held a leash from which a dog leaned toward the fence, straining, teeth exposed in an eager, hungry dog smile. ‘I will bite you if I get a chance,’ the smile said. ‘They will reward me if I do it well.’
‘How many of them do you have?’ the guardsman asked in a significant voice.
She started to say, ‘Five,’ then choked the word off as Rouge barked a treble puppy bark and nipped at Liquorice’s ear. ‘This is Rouge,’ Marianne said weakly. ‘This is Liquorice.’
He nodded, moving off down the row of spectators. At the far, right-hand corner of the palace was a low tower, crowned with a row of arched and curtained windows. One of the curtains twitched as though someone had been standing behind it, watching.
Marianne turned away. She wanted to look for Gold and Silver and Delphy, but something told her it would be dangerously foolish to do so just now. The place felt like the streets did just before change, shivering with purpose. Something impended. She hurried away through the crowd, slowing as it thinned in order not to draw attention to herself.
There were only a few blocks to traverse, back to the laundry. As she turned the last corner, she noted half consciously that the street was empty, an unusual thing for this time of night. It was not until she had come halfway from the corner, however, that they stepped out of an alley and came toward her.
Their hair was stiffened into spikes and dyed in shades of bright green or purple or blue. Their faces were painted. She stopped where she was, thought of running, knew it would do no good. Her money belt was at home. They would take her wallet, but she could spare that. If that was all they took…
‘Hey, mama,’ the largest of them said. His voice was silky, insinuating, a rapist’s voice. ‘Hey, lady. Hey, you. Where you goin’?’
It would do no good to talk. Talking would only make it worse. If she could stay on the street, likely they would not kill her. The Map Police did not like people being killed on the street. She was silent, quiet, holding her bag across her chest like a shield.
His name was written on his forehead in blue ink. Ironballs. Fanning out behind him were Blueshit and Wrecker, their names tattooed above the brows in purple and red, and a huge, muscular woman with her name on both cheeks, Brasstits. Her gilded nipples thrust through holes in a leather vest.
Rouge whined, pawed at the edge of the sack, overbalanced and dropped to the sidewalk with an abrupt half-bark of surprise.
‘Hey, she’s got puppies,’ said the woman in a narrow, nasal voice which was so surprised it was for the moment nonthreatening. ‘Pups!’
‘His name is Rouge,’ Marianne found the voice to say. ‘The other one is Liquorice.’
‘Where’d you get ’em?’ Ironballs asked in a mild tone.
‘I guess they were abandoned,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. ‘I found them.’
‘In a alley, huh?’ he said, almost sympathetically. She did not correct him. She didn’t want them to know where she lived, or worked. She merely nodded, not moving. Liquorice tried to climb out of the bag and she set him down beside Rouge.
‘We could eat ’em,’ offered Blueshit. ‘I ate dog once.’
‘You’d eat shit,’ Brasstits offered mildly. ‘You’d cut off your mother’s tit and eat that. Trouble with you, Blue, is you got no discrimination.’
Rouge, moving with unpuppylike speed, darted toward the alley entrance from which the mapless ones had emerged. With a shout, half of amusement, half of challenge, Brasstits turned and pursued him, Blueshit and Wrecker close behind, whooping with glee. Ironballs stayed where he was, eyeing Marianne as though he planned to butcher her for the pot. ‘What you got good, Mama? Got money? Love or money, which? Huh? Maybe both?’ He raped her with his eyes, an anticipatory revel.
Liquorice barked briefly, lifted his infant leg and peed on the man’s boots. Ironballs let out a yell of rage and snatched at the pup who darted just out of reach, toward the alley.
‘Go home,’ said a voice in Marianne’s ear. ‘Go home, fast.’
Ironballs was chasing Liquorice; the others of the gang were chasing Rouge. For the moment, none of them was watching her. Marianne got into the laundry and double-locked the door, then stood in the dark, watching the street through a crack in the shutter.
A sound drew her attention from the window. All five of the pups were sitting behind her in a line, watching her watching the street. Rouge and Liquorice had somehow rejoined the others.
Out in the street, the four mapless ones emerged from the alley once more to stare up and down the street, waving their arms and cursing one another loudly for the loss of their prey.
‘Thank you,’ said Marianne.
‘You’re welcome,’ said the voice in her mind.
She looked into Gold’s eyes, seeing something there of comprehension. ‘You said that?’ she challenged.
‘Woof,’ Gold replied in a puppyish treble, licking her front paw. ‘Woof.’
The following morning, the Clean Machine was only a block from the palace. Marianne felt this was uncomfortably close. Too near the center of things. Early in the morning people started flowing toward the palace grounds; all day the crowds pushed to and fro, ripple-mobs of people ebbing and flowing. Her first customer of the day was a talkative old man with a cane. He had an ancient curve-topped trunk to be laundered.
‘Got to frettin’ me,’ he said, counting out the coins that the chart gave as the correct charge for luggage – one piece, footlocker or larger. ‘Don’t know what might be in there. All kinds of memories, most likely. Things I don’t want to rake up. Thought I’d launder it first.’ He peered curiously about him, inspecting every corner of the place, taking a tottery step or two to look into Marianne’s little office, committing it to memory. The eyes he turned on her were keen and youthful in the wrinkled face.
‘We’re very glad to take care of it for you,’ Marianne murmured, maneuvering her loading cart through the door to the curb where the bus driver had dropped the trunk. ‘We’ll just put it here for the indigo washer as soon as this cycle’s complete.’
‘People in there?’ he asked as she re-entered with the trunk. ‘Seem to hear them yellin’ about somethin’.’
‘No,’ she answered absentmindedly. ‘As a matter of fact, that’s a mixed load. Two parrots from the pet store down the block and a set of encyclopedias. A mother brought the books in. Before she gives them to her children.’
‘Ah,’ he nodded wisely. ‘Stuff she doesn’t want the kiddy widdles to know, most likely. My ma was the same way. We knew all about it from the kids at school and watchin’ the farm animals, but she’d have it we was innocent as daisies. Well. Mamas are like that.’
‘Are they?’ Marianne asked. It was one of those bits of conversation that annoyed her, often keeping her awake at night. Were mamas like that? How did he know? And if he knew, why didn’t she?
‘Most of ’em,’ he confided, sitting down on one of the uncomfortable chairs and pulling a folded newspaper from his pocket. ‘Says here there’s going to be rain this summer.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yep. Says so here. Says the royal family’s goin’ on a tour. Foreign parts. The Queen and the Duke of Eyes.’
This was another thing that annoyed her. Foreign parts. Other places. Where? Why had she never thought of going? Why had she never met anyone who had gone? And who was the Duke of Eyes? His picture was not in any of the royal portraits she had hung in the office. Queen, King, the Jack of Japes, Lady Ten. No Duke at all.
The buzzer on the indigo washer went off with an ear-shattering shriek. Marianne shut it off hastily and opened the door. The two parrots emerged, damp and disheveled, to perch on the dryer door and complain to her. There seemed to be nothing left of the set of encyclopedias.
‘Thought that’d happen,’ the old man said, rising to help her get the trunk into the machine. ‘That’s the trouble with things in writin’. Sometimes you take one little word away and the whole thing falls apart. Ever notice that?’
Marianne thrust the trunk into the machine, set the dials, and turned purposefully toward the parrots. They, meantime, had flown up to one of the light fixtures and regarded her with disfavor from that lofty height.
‘Quite dry enough, thank you,’ one of them offered. ‘As is my friend.’
‘You’re dripping all over the floor,’ Marianne observed.
‘As would you,’ said the other parrot, regarding her warily, ‘if you had been forcibly immersed in that monster. I want to say something but can’t remember what.’
‘That’s what the laundering was for,’ the first parrot reminded him. ‘Language.’
‘I’d forgotten,’ said the second. ‘Isn’t that astonishing. ’Well, though I seem to be unable to remember the proper words, whatever vile and insulting language best suits the occasion, Miss, consider it said.’ He began to preen himself with ostentatious fervor as Marianne and the old man watched, eyes wide.
‘Thought I’d walk over and see the palace,’ the old man observed, ‘while that washes.’
‘Feel free to do so,’ she remarked absently. ‘I’ll put it in the dryer for you.’ Silver had come into the room and appeared to be in silent conversation with the parrots, a colloquy of gesture, paw taps, wing shrugs, head twistings. As the old man left, the pet shop woman came to fetch her birds, a cage in either hand, and as she left a guardsman entered, his shiny little eyes peering into every corner of the room.
‘Name?’ he asked, flipping open a notebook.
‘The Clean Machine,’ she said, mouth open in astonishment. There had never been a guardsman in the laundry before.
‘No, lovey, your name.’
‘Marianne,’ she replied. ‘Just Marianne.’
‘Well, Just Marianne, this is a routine procedure. Each day we investigate all premises within three blocks of the palace. Lookin’ for anarchists and revolutionaries, so they tell us, not that we’ve ever found any. Found a nest of revisionists once, but nobody cared.’
‘What were they revising?’ she asked, truly curious.
‘Don’t know. Didn’t ask ’em. Now. This is a cleaning establishment, right? You the proprietor?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m only the manager.’
‘Live on the premises?’
‘There’s an apartment upstairs.’
‘Married? Cohabiting? Children?’
‘No.’ She started to mention the dogs, but then was quite unaccountably silent.
‘Where were you yesterday?’
‘About six blocks away,’ she admitted. ‘I went to look at the palace after closing time.’
‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’
No, she thought, even as her head nodded polite agreement. It wasn’t much of a sight, really. There hadn’t been that much to see. She didn’t say it. He wrote busily in his book for a moment, starting as the buzzer on the indigo machine went off.
‘What in hell!’
‘It’s just the machine,’ she explained. ‘Excuse me. I have to take the trunk out.’ But when she opened the machine, she could not take the
trunk out. It had vanished, in that unaccountable way in which things intended for cleaning sometimes did vanish, as though they were held together by dirt, by a kind of ephemeral filth that could be dismissed by water and soap. Of course, things sometimes reappeared, as well. Reconstituted, one might say. She stared into the washer, waiting for the trunk to emerge. In its place were five velvet cushions, sodden and steaming, a gemmed crown on each, glittering like malignant octopus eyes from a water cave.
‘Aha,’ said the guardsman. ‘Got you.’
The cell in which they left her was not uncomfortable. There was a cot, a toilet, a basin, a glass for drinking water, even a screen so she could use the facilities without undue display to anyone peering in through the little grated window. The room was reasonably warm, and it was dry. On a table by the heavy door, barred with iron and studded with thick nails of gleaming bronze, the five crowns huddled like socialites in a drunk tank, making a fierce show of quality to cow whomever was responsible for the outrage.
Marianne was no longer looking at them. She had looked, for a time, trying to remember if she had indeed stolen any such thing, for this is what she was accused of. She had tried to explain to the guardsman that the crowns were not unlike the elephant harness or the double bed, having arrived in some similar and as unexplainable a fashion, but he had been unwilling to entertain any such possibility.
‘You were at the palace, you admit it,’ he said.
‘Only out by the fence. Along with hundreds of other people.’
‘But you were there. And five things disappeared, and now you have five things.’
What could she say to that? She did, indeed, have them. Even now she had them. ‘The broadcast didn’t say what things,’ she pleaded. ‘It didn’t say what things at all!’
He sneered, pointing. Could anyone doubt that crowns like these belonged in a palace? Could anyone doubt they had no business in the indigo washer at the Clean Machine?
Marianne sank onto the cot. She wondered if the old man had ever come back for his trunk. She wondered if crying would help. She wondered if screaming would help and decided it would not; the sound of screaming had echoed through the prison almost since she had entered it, sometimes softly and plaintively, sometimes with an excess of agony that made it quite unbearable to hear.